Flexible electronic products often comprise multiple foils which relate to different functionalities. Such an electronic product could for example comprise a foil with an OLED functionality, a foil having printed photodiodes and a driver foil. Such configuration may be used for manufacturing flexible displays, for example.
It will be appreciated that all these foils need to be combined with each other to yield the final product. Such combining is often effectuated using a lamination step. Accordingly, it may be required to ensure optical, fluidic or electrical interconnection between the foils. These steps may be carried out under aligned lamination.
In general, such lamination may be carried out piece-wise, i.e. when one or both laminands comprise consecutive segments of limited size, for example the segments may be about 30 cm long. These segments are preferably interconnected by non-functional areas, which may be about 1 cm long. Accordingly, an independent alignment is required per segment as the non-functional areas may be mechanically weak are deformable.
An embodiment of a foil processing device is known from U.S. Pat. No. 7,640,836. The known device relates to a web processing apparatus configured to enable relatively high speed operations. In the known device a processing station is provided arranged a vacuum hold down plate which is arranged for receiving and holding an image bearing incremental segment of the web. During operation, in feed and out feed tension on the web is released which a segment of the web is held by the hold down plate. The hold down plate with a segment of the web thereon may be selectively shifted about X, Y axes and rotated about the θ axis for bringing the image on the web segment into alignment with a web processing component at the processing station. The known device is arranged to enable substrate handling for performing coarse and fine alignment of two foils having respective patterns.
It is a disadvantage of the known device that it is provided with a complex architecture of cooperating parts, which may be less desirable from the maintenance considerations and due to elevated costs.